Film Club in collaboration with Coding Collective and Digital Freedom Society brings you the screening of the award winning documentary film, The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. The film depicts the life of Aaron Swartz through rare archive footage and is narrated by figures from Swartz's life, including Tim Berners-Lee, Gabriella Coleman, Cory Doctorow, Cindy Cohn, Lawrence Lessig, Carl Malmud, his own family, and co-workers. Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. He was the co-creator of SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the Open Library, the free digital library with over 2M public domain books.
As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, and the syntax of the lightweight markup language format Markdown, and was a co-owner of the social news aggregation website Reddit and contributed to its development until he left the company in 2007. The Aaron Swartz Day is observed every year on Nov 8 commemorating his birthday, and events are organized across the globe on this day celebrating his life and legacy.
Film running time is 105 minutes, followed by discussion for 15 minutes if audience members are interested.
Saturday 08 November 2025 5pm - 7pm
Churchill Room